Revealing Soliloquy: The Exploration and Effects of Cultural Hybridity in Iranian-American Literature Master Thesis Literature and Cultural Criticism Utrecht, 22-01-2014 Toa Maes, 3372790 First supervisor: Prof. Dr. A. Rigney Second reader: Dr. B. Bagchi Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other members uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain. Saadi, Bani Adam (translation by M. Aryanpour) Contents Introduction: A Visual Introduction to Transnationalism in Iranian-American Literature ..................... 1 Chapter 1: World Literature and its Borders .............................................................. 6 Chapter 2: ‗Hazard the Distances‘ Iranian-American Women‘s Memoirs and the Critical Responses ................................ 18 Chapter 3: ‗Feel Out of Place‘: Cultural and Linguistic Hybridity in Iranian-American Return Narratives ..................... 30 Chapter 4: ‗A Love Story‘: Cultural and Linguistical Hybridity in Shahriar Mandanipour‘s Censoring an Iranian Love Story ................................................................................................................. 38 Conclusion: In the Translation Zone ........................................................................................ 43 Works Cited ........................................................................................................ 45 Introduction A Visual Introduction to Transnationalism in Iranian-American Literature 1. Shirin Neshat, 2. Shirin Neshat, still from video Soliloquy, 1999 Rebellious Silence, 1994 Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat (1957) left Iran in 1974 to study abroad in the United States. Because of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, followed by the establishment of the Islamic Republic, it took Neshat nearly twenty years to return to Iran. Her return in 1993 marked the starting point for her early photograph series titled Unveiled (1993) and the Women of Allah (1993-97). Begum Özden Firat, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, has described these early works of Neshat as focusing on ‗the Islamic Revolution in Iran and particularly on the subject of women in relation to violence and politics‘ (Firat, 207). Rebellious Silence (figure 1), which is part of the Women of Allah series shows Neshat using well-known elements such as the gun and the veil to represent the violence and politics that emerged from the Islamic Revolution. According to Firat, these images not only refer to the Iranian context but ‗are also generic images for the ―Muslim Other‖‘ (Firat, 209). Firat writes: ‗On the surface, the images do nothing but reproduce the historically constructed fantasy and fear of the Orient by employing overused signs of 1 the Orient‘ (209). The photographs show veiled women that the Western viewer would probably connect to mandatory veiling, Islam and oppression. In a similar way, the text inscribed on the woman‘s face could be connected to the Koran and the gun could be linked to Islamic fundamentalism. The text, however, which is unreadable for most Western viewers, consists of quotes from famous Iranian feminist poets. Firat argues that this unreadable aspect of Neshat‘s work signifies the way in which a Western audience is incapable of looking through the stereotypes: The viewer who fails to read the image in the absence of a translation interprets it through an Orientalist discourse that defines the Muslim Other by means of historically constructed culturally mediated stereotypes. In fact, this encouraged ‗misreading‘ implicitly whispers to the viewer that rather than the veil concealing the body, it is the Western discourse about the Muslim world that obscures the viewers‘ eyes. (Firat, 212-213) At the same time, Neshat‘s photographs and the unreadable inscriptions encourage its viewers to look beyond the stereotypes, because the impossibility to translate foregrounds the difficulties of cultural translation. As Firat writes: The handwritten text on the Women of Allah images comments on the possibility of cross- cultural viewing positions at the intersections of the visual and the verbal, of looking and reading, of translation and unreadability, all of which convene on the body of the artist that is inscribed with calligraphy. (Firat, 210) As Firat and other critics put it, Neshat uses stereotype images to engage the viewer in looking beyond their prejudices. On the website of the Guggenheim museum is written about Neshat‘s work: ‗While these works hint at the restrictive nature of Islamic laws regarding women, they deliberately open onto multiple readings, reaching instead toward universal conditions‘. The untranslated Farsi inscriptions confront Western viewers with their incapability to fully interpret the image, pointing out the possibilities and impossibilities of translation. In Neshat‘s later works, such as Soliloquy (figure 2), the image of the veiled women keeps playing an important part. Soliloquy consists of two analogous videos that are 2 projected on opposite walls. The veiled woman is Neshat herself and the videos show her traveling from a Middle Eastern setting to a Western capital. The Tate Museum describes Soliloquy as ‗a comment on Neshat‘s experience of living between two cultures‘. Soliloquy puts the audience in between two different locations. The viewer stands in the middle of the two projected videos, moving between two cultural images, but incapable of seeing both at the same time. It confronts the audience with the impossibility of seeing the veiled woman in two different places at the same time. However, as Iranian- American woman, Neshat expresses with Soliloquy her transnational position of being situated in-between these two cultures. A unique space which she can – literally and metaphorically – project both at the same time. Similar as the Women of Allah photography‘s, Soliloquy confronts the viewers with questions about the ‗possibility of cross-cultural viewing positions‘ (Firat, 210). Neshat‘s artwork visually represents her transnational identity, yet also illustrates the difficulties and impossibilities of showing her Iranian-American position. Her work is interpreted as ―drawing attention to complex questions of cultural translation‖ (Dadi, 128) but also reflects the limiting situation of the Western viewer, who is neither capable of seeing the complete image or of understanding the Farsi inscriptions. As I will show, these examples of Neshat‘s artwork offer a visual introduction to the same themes that Iranian-American writers deal with in their literature. The 1979 Iranian revolution marked an immense political turning point for Iran. The establishment of the Islamic Republic was the beginning of a more complex and conflicted relationship with the West and especially with the United States, which designated Iran as part of the so-called ‗axis of evil‘. After the revolution, because of the establishment of the Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance, several laws and restrictions were put in place for censoring art and media. Due to strict censorship and widespread arrests, many Iranian authors moved to other countries to pursue their writing and publishing. Therefore, Iranian-American literature came into being as a result of the 1979 revolution, as Persis M. Karim writes in her article ‗Reflections on Literature after the 1979 Revolution in Iran and in the Diaspora‘ (2009): 3 Both inside and outside Iran, writers have taken the opportunity to reflect on and write about the changes and tensions that have shaped Iran‘s post-revolutionary society and, for those who chose to leave Iran for other parts of the world, about the challenges of remaking their lives elsewhere. (151) Karim also observes that contemporary Iranian-American literature is ‗a literature that begs the question what it means to move beyond any particular national category‘ (154). Iranian-American writers inhabit the same transnational position as artist Neshat, of being in-between two cultures. Their literature reflects this intermediate space between two divergent nations. Bearing Neshat‘s work in mind, I want to approach several Iranian-American works of literature in terms of this ‗cultural translation‘ and try to answer the following question: How does the literature of Iranian-American writers reflect their position between two cultures? To answer my research question I want to analyze a corpus of Iranian-American literature. Iranian-American writers express their transnational positions by narrating their life stories, in the same way Neshat portrayed herself in Soliloquy. Karim writes: ‗One of the most obvious phenomena of Iranian diaspora literature has been the explosion of women‘s memoirs‘ (153). In the same way that Neshat‘s Women of Allah reflects the limits of linguistical and cultural translation by the Western viewer, Iranian- American authors have to explain many cultural differences when writing for a Western reading public.1 I have chosen to start my analysis with Azar Nafisi‘s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2004) and Fatemeh Keshavarz‘s critical reaction of Nafisi‘s memoir, Jasmine an Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (2009). Iranian-American authors not only 1 Although I focus exclusively on Iranian-American literature, I am aware that this is only a small part of all sorts of migration literature that deal with the explanation of cultural differences and the expression